Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play?

No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year. Henry V is far from the Bard’s worst, but it is a second-rate work that is poorly suited to the present day.

Fundamentally, the final play in Shakespeare’s second history cycle is about the glories of militarism. It follows an arrogant and thin-skinned Plantagenet monarch who, smarting from personal insult, launches an invasion of France. The king believes there are ancestral territorial claims that justify his campaign. He is seething with paranoia and surrounded by a nest of viperous advisors. He makes dexterous use of misinformation and propaganda. Sound familiar?

In the past, Henry V resonated when the nation was bruised and battered, and in need of a morale boost. In 1944, Laurence Olivier (sporting a pageboy haircut to match his cut-glass accent) directed and starred in a rah-rah film adaptation that was intended to rouse the spirits of a wearied Britain. Today, Henry V is unfashionable, a confounding play to stage amid ongoing conflicts overseas. Moreover, in an Australian context, patriotism and military glory are not inextricably linked, and ‘national identity’ is the site of bitter contestation.

Odile Le Clézio as Alice, Mararo Wangai as Montjoy, Ella Prince as Exeter, Rishab Kern as Grey, Harrison Mills as Scroop, Jack Halabi as Dauphin, Alex Kirwan as Westmoreland (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Bell Shakespeare’s new production, which opened on March 5 at Sydney Opera House’s Playhouse Theatre, does not have the boldness and imagination needed to resuscitate a mediocre play. It attempts to recast Henry V as an anti-war satire, an approach that is in sharp opposition to the text itself. This is probably the only approach a modern audience would accept, but the production only half-commits to that vision: the result is occasionally thrilling, more often tedious and confusing.

Director Marion Potts has eviscerated the text, hacking it down to under two hours and eliminating many subplots and characters – on the slab is anything related to Sir John Falstaff and Henry IV. One side effect of the deletions is that the focus remains squarely on King Henry, and we lose a sense of how war impacts ordinary citizens. The play is reduced to a monarchical struggle for power fought on the battlefield and in the banquet hall.

Anna Tregloan’s minimalist set is largely bare except for a long metallic trolley-like structure that bisects the stage, along with a couple of leather punching bags hanging from the ceiling. It evokes a gym or a butcher shop. The trolley proves more versatile in later scenes, though it is not as inventively utilised as it could have been. The costuming is a sea of green, browns, and khaki casual wear; it calls to mind both the Ukrainian war and Silicon Valley tech-bro in their low-key gym attire.

In the opening scenes, the play struggles with pacing and movement: it is a series of crushingly boring speeches about land and inheritance, largely delivered by stationary actors. It lacks sufficient vitality to keep the audience engaged. Things pick up during the Battle of Harfleur, and tension does start to build as Agincourt looms.

Baffling directing choices abound: the famous tennis balls from Act 1, Scene 2 are left onstage for the rest of the play, a tripping hazard for the performers if ever there was one. The Battle of Agincourt, the actors mud-smeared and moving in slow motion, resembles not war but modern interpretative dance. The interjections of the Chorus – triumphalist accounts of the king’s warfare – are delivered with a deathly ironic seriousness.

As King Henry, J.K. Kazzi has the matinee-idol looks of a Timothée Chalamet, but his performance is limited to two registers: deadpanning and shouting. His physicality rarely accentuates (or even clarifies) the meaning of Shakespeare’s verse. There are some interesting echoes in his performance of the kind of obnoxious alt-right bro character that is so ubiquitous now, but it is not a performance of variety or depth. His St Crispin’s Day speech is desultory, less a soaring appeal to his ‘band of brothers’ than a flattened pitch to would-be investors.

The other actors fare better. Ella Prince brings grit and determination to Henry’s adviser Exeter. Jack Halabi, as the Dauphin, has been styled to resemble Volodymyr Zelensky; he brings exuberance and charm to a role almost entirely in French. The few comic moments that survive the excisions belong to Odile Le Clézio’s Alice, attempting to teach Princess Katherine (Ava Madon) English.

There is one scene when Henry 5 flickers into life, and we see a glimpse of the mordant, subversive production it might have been. After his victory at the Battle of Agincourt, Henry becomes engaged to Princess Katherine to unite the Houses of Plantagenet and Valois. Ordinarily, as in Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film, this scene is played as romantic comedy; the couple falls in love over the course of a conversation. Here, the engagement is reframed as a disturbing act of violation, with the King demanding a non-consensual kiss from the princess. The scene, a powerful one and cleverly directed, recalls Henry’s earlier threat at Harfleur to destroy France: ‘In liberty of bloody hand shall range / With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass / Your fair fresh virgins and your flow’ring infants.’ It gestures towards the appalling consequences of war and the ways in which hypocrites abuse their power.

The remainder of Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 5 does not rise to the level of this one scene. King Henry, ‘this Star of England’, is no heroic prince, and the production is not a celebration of military valour. Nor does it go far enough in reshaping the text to become an urgent anti-war satire.

Henry 5 (Bell Shakespeare) continues at the Opera House until 5 April 2025 before travelling to Canberra and Melbourne. Performance attended: March 5